The Return of CAMBAM Student Seminars

Fall is in the air here at McGill, bringing with it crisp mornings, frisbee in the lower field and the CAMBAM student seminar! The seminar takes place bi-weekly in room 1120 of Burnside Hall from 4-5pm.

The schedule for Fall 2017 is:

Date/Speaker/Trivia

Sept 27/Amir pt. 1: Following Google themed trivia where Kyle won 2-0, Amir spoke to us about the longest common sequence (L.C.S) problem from the computer science and microbiology perspectives. After introducing the problem, Amir discussed the naive algorithm and dynamic programming principle for the L.C.S problem before leaving us on a cliffhanger waiting to see the application to mRNA transcription.

Oct 4/Amir pt. 2: Mahmoud won alternate search engine trivia. Amir continued his presentation of the alignment problem in bioinformatics, introduced the idea of deletion, insertion and copying mutations in DNA transcription/translation, and stated the Needlemann-Wunsch and Smith-Waterman theorems.

Oct 11/ Kyle/Yujing: Yujing asked a series of questions about the logisitic map, music and Saskatchewan. Kyle presented an age structured model of red blood cell production. There was a lively discussion about units, integrals and maturation.

Oct 18/Laurent/Matt: Laurent presented some of his work discretizing the Fokker-Planck equation in order to model how immune cells ingest nanoparticles.

Oct 25/Matt/Amir : Amir led off with global warming trivia and the dire state of the world. Matt spoke about a L1 minimization problem in genetics and Mahmoud presented his difference equation model for ant populations.

Nov 8/Tyler/Kyle: Kyle asked about plastic production, recycling and exponential growth of plastic in landfills. Tyler talked about exponential growth of monocytes in the bone marrow, what are white blood cells good for anyways and who cares?

There are still spots available for speakers, if any one would like to present their present research, a paper they have read or a question they have thought about! Seminars are run in chalk-talk format, although it is possible to use a projector.

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